New Hotmail roll-out going slowly – on purpose

Microsoft is slowly rolling out the Hotmail updates it announced two weeks ago – still, fewer than 1 percent of Hotmail users (so, a few million) have seen the changes, Microsoft said Tuesday.

“We roll out new software slowly at first in order to give our engineers a chance to study the new software running at scale with real customers,” Mike Schackwitz, a Hotmail program manager, wrote in a blog post.

“When we roll out new software, we typically find a few things that we want to tweak before going out more broadly. Most of these things are actually invisible to our customers – they usually have to do with our ability to monitor the site or make the rollout itself go more smoothly.”

During the past two weeks, Microsoft has made a few “minor,” under-the-hood changes to the popular Windows Live webmail service. The team just added new users with different hardware types for further testing, and the large-scale deployment “will really pick up speed” after that, Schackwitz wrote.

“Of course, we have hundreds of (test) clusters and we want to make sure everything goes smoothly,” he said, “so it will still take a few weeks to finish.”

The update is part of Microsoft’s rolling Windows Live Wave 4 release. One big additionis the ability to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents from their inboxes using Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. Those are lightweight, cloud-based versions of the basic Office suite – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote – designed to compete with Google Apps.